Frances addressed The Oldie Literary Lunch on her Baillie Gifford non-fiction prize nominated book Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark telling us that writing it changed her own character significantly, telling The Oldie, “I used to be ironic. I used to be sceptical. I’m not anymore.” The prize will be announced in a couple of weeks.
Frances was referring to being spiritually possessed by Muriel - a “disturbing experience”.
In Spark’s second novel Robinson, she described herself as “Muriel the model with the X-ray eyes” — a phrase that became uncannily prophetic.
Wilson found herself not just researching Spark, but living her, telling us that things “that happened to her body tended to happen to mine,” such as losing a tooth, being burgled and becoming paranoid.
Muriel Spark didn’t just believe in fate, she believed she was inside God’s plot. She lived, she said, in “space-time space,” where events could be seen before they happened. Her fiction was filled with eerie prolepses: “He looked as if he would murder me — and he did.”
Muriel’s contemporaries didn’t know what to make of her. Evelyn Waugh told his children to pray for her “because she was a saint.” Frank Kermode said she had “the evil eye.” Bernard Levin put it bluntly: “Had she lived in an earlier century, she would doubtless have been burned at the stake as the witch that she was.”
Wilson, too, fell under her spell. She described writing the book in four months (normally a four-year process) as if in a trance.
“It was like being possessed. I wasn’t inhabiting her mind. She was inhabiting mine.”
Hilary Mantel may have put it best, “For some people, being dead is only a relative condition.”
